


On Demons

by AndoralsReach



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 01:46:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1839847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndoralsReach/pseuds/AndoralsReach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Speculative, bound-to-be-proven-wrong-by-canon fic about Cole's introduction to the Inquisition. Mainly about Cole and the Inquisitor, gen, warnings for mentions of character death, casual references to people hurting each other etc. Inquisitor featured is Solstice, my Adaar warrior lady. Spoilers for Inquisition, Asunder.</p>
<p>Uploading to somewhere more permanent in a celebration of Cole (finally!) getting his DA:I companion confirmation!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He knows at once she is a monster.

 ~

 He tails the mages’ envoy all the way from Andoral’s Reach, not out of any real purpose but because he simply doesn’t know what else to do. The Spire is filled with ghosts, the very walls soaked with blood and bad memories, and Cole does not wish to become one of them. Not again. So he finds the only people in the world he calls friends and simply elects to follow them.

He keeps so far behind that the caravan is perpetually on the knife-edge of disappearing into the horizon. They may be his friends but he knows, now, that he cannot be theirs. They must not see. No matter how much he misses them, he cannot face the idea of looking into their eyes and finding rejection.

There are two villages nestled halfway up the mountain; the first is new, full of too many chantry sisters and - by the time he gets to it - bustling with activity. He finds the second merely by virtue of going out of his way to avoid the first. It’s a ghost town, dilapidated houses full of dust and old blood and pantries full of food long since rotted to dust and powder. There’s something about it that reminds him strongly of the Pit, ripped out of the ground and exposed to the searing wind.

This is as close as he is willing to get to the temple sitting at the peak, packed as it is with too many people. He half wonders if Rhys and Evangeline will ever leave that place alive, surrounded by Seekers and Templars and all manner of people who are not to be trusted. The thought scares him, but the fear of the crowd is stronger, and so instead he just sits amongst old gravestones that were once tended by a village that is itself long dead, once again paralyzed into inaction. Waiting for something to happen.

And then the sky explodes.

 ~

 Cole can already smell the death, can feel the buzzing echoes of despair reverberate in his bones long before he actually makes it to the top of the mountain.

He has barely any recollection of the massacre at White Spire - at the time, Cole’s perception was very sharply focused on Rhys. But in the intervening months his mind has mapped a kaleidoscope of horrors to the screams and blurred glimpses of carnage he did witness. Now they press in on him, a nightmare threatening to manifest at the peak.

What he finds is infinitely worse.

The tear in reality gapes like a maw; before he even gets anywhere near it he is stumbling across debris. The hard, spindly evergreens that cling to the rocky ground are stripped and broken like limbs, their remaining branches adorned with guttering flames instead of leaves.

There is nothing left so intact at the center of the event. The old temple must have been huge to house such a large meeting but there is barely a trace of it now, only scatterings of rubble. The song from Pharamond’s fortress is here, too, like a whisper across a saw blade, dancing on the edge of hearing.

He wants desperately to cry out and finds he cannot. He can’t tell through the hammering of his heart whether this is because he is slipping out of reality or merely because his throat has constricted, or even if the two sensations are one and the same.

He has seen skeletons before but these are not skeletons - they are grotesque mockeries of statues, bones frozen in halfway through motions that scream of anguish and agony. Any of these could be all that’s left of his friends and he will never know. He has not eaten in days - he knows now that he does not really need to - but that doesn’t stop the rise of bile in this throat, and he retches, hard, curling hands into the ashy ground because the only things upright enough to brace himself against are the corpses.

When it eventually subsides, he can hear voices in the distance. Orders are barked. _Survivors,_ he thinks, and then balks; above him the air pulls unnatural, the eerie light of the Fade spilling out onto the scorched earth. Here, perhaps, under an unworldly sky, he has finally found a place where he is visible to all, and he hopes above everything that he isn’t. He picks his way towards the noise quietly, hyperaware of the way every careless sound carries across the disaster area. Figures fade into view through the clouds of dust and smoke. And he knows even before the silhouettes become clear that everything is lost.

There is no Evangeline. No Rhys. Just Seekers, and a monster.

She is a giant; she towers over the others, great horns curving back along her skull. There is an air of mild panic about the Seekers – rescuers probably, rather than survivors – but the giant is still, a monolith of serenity amongst frantic movement.

They don’t kill her.

Cole watches as they lead her away. Some of the Seekers give the area a last weary look as they leave, but it is clear that as far as they are concerned, the monstrous woman is the only one who walked out of the disaster alive. He is left standing alone in the sea of bodies.

It’s too much. He can feel the walls of the world closing in around him. He curls into himself as the tear of terrible grief catches in his throat, threatens to swallow him whole and drag him into darkness. This time there is no Rhys to hold him, no Evangeline to whisper soothing words in his ear.

Only ashes.

  ~

They’ve given Giant her own tent, now. Cole doesn’t quite understand what’s happening or why the dynamics are shifting so fast; at first, the Seekers treated her like a prisoner. Over the course of weeks that hostility had shifted to a wary respect, to camaraderie, to something like deference.

Now she has her own private lodgings, and Cole can’t for the life of him understand why they cannot see her for what she is.

Rhys had told him once that he could sense the presence of demons. That turned out to be only partially true, but Cole wonders if he himself hasn’t gained the same talent. Maybe he is the only one that sees her as a giant.

 It’s not just the way she looks, either. Something about being in the vicinity of her sets Cole’s teeth on edge. It’s nothing tangible, just a low, anxious buzzing at the base of his spine that reminds him of Archdemons and too-open skies. Is this what it means, to have scraped together some semblance of knowledge about himself? That he can tell that this woman does not fit in a way that nobody else seems to have noticed?

For the hundredth time, he wishes that there was somebody in the world who could explain his muddled existence to him in terms he could understand. Somebody who could tell him what to do.

He had got close to her in the night once, oscillating wildly between curiosity and the desire to take revenge, quick and swift. While she slept and the night guards looked on oblivious, he had crouched over her, thumbing his blade and trying to think.

Was it even possible for demons to do what had been done up in the mountains? Surely not usually, otherwise the White Spire would never have been built so close to the rest of the city. Even the chaos they’d all experienced out in the badlands had been a hundred times less catastrophic. Either she is exceptionally powerful, or there is something bigger going on.

It would be so simple if he could set the blame at her feet entirely. Then he could slit her throat and be done with it. But the possibilities gnaw away at him. He cannot bear the idea of not avenging his friends, and partial vengeance is not enough – if she is not the only thing responsible, maybe continuing to follow her will lead to others.  What if he killed her, only to realize later that she had been his only chance to uncover the whole thing?

He cannot begin to imagine what he will do afterwards, walking like a ghost through the world with no friends and no purpose. So for the sake of himself, for Rhys and Evangeline, he must be patient. This is the last thing he can do for them, and it must be perfect.

Now he is sitting in her tent, watching her hunched shoulders in the lamplight. She doesn’t spend much time alone, or out of the elements; Cole has tailed the giant and her ever-growing entourage for weeks, and she seems to spend as much time out of her tent as she can, usually surrounded by people. But tonight the rain is torrential, and there is nobody left outside who does not absolutely have to be.

He has long since got fed up of sleeping outside on nights like these and has taken to borrowing floorspace in another tent from one of Giant’s oblivious companions, but this is the first time he’s gathered enough courage to enter hers. That sense of not-rightness about her scares him; but it’s dry in here, and quiet, and he half-wonders if observing her alone will be what may lead to answers.

The giant is sitting on the floor, a sword laid casually across her crossed legs. Beside her, thin strips of leather lie in a jumble of muted colour, perhaps offcuts from some other project. With the canvas walls muffling the noise of the camp and the howl of the wind, she patiently takes the strips and carefully interweaves them along the hilt of the blade, in-out, in-out, a pattern forming with silent rhythm.

It seems a curious diversion for a monster.

Some of the Tranquil mages used to do work like this, back at the Spire. Repetitive work, more about muscle memory than conscious thought, and Cole doesn’t see why anybody would willingly dedicate so much uninterrupted time to such an activity if they hadn’t been ordered to.

Still, it’s sort of soothing to watch. After a while he finds himself standing over her, watching the patchwork weave take shape, red against ochre against brown.  Her huge hands look oddly delicate up this close, the movement of her fingers quick and precise in a way that suggests she has done this many times before.

"Lean in any closer and I’ll snap your neck," she says, and Cole jumps so hard he nearly knocks the entire tent over, stumbling backwards and hitting one of the wooden supports.

The woman stands up the way a snake uncoils - with a leisure that displays immense confidence, and she just _keeps going_ \- she is taller than anybody he has ever seen, taller even than the hazy memory of his father, stretched and heightened by childhood and the terror of reminiscence. His first instinct is to reach into himself and call up something more powerful than the natural imperceptibility that cloaks him – a conscious invisibility, something he’s only ever had to use in a few instances before. The power inside him bubbles black, coiling itself around his lungs.

And nothing happens.

She’s still staring at him, and her eyes are narrowed in a way that reminds him of how stray cats down in the Pit would watch their prey before they pounced. She’s standing between him and the exit. For one wild moment he teeters on the edge of panic, caught between fight and flight, and feels his hand go instinctively to his waist before he even makes a conscious decision to do so.

"I think that would be a mistake," says the demon, in a voice so full of quiet authority that he finds himself hesitating, hand hovering over his blade. “You owe me an explanation.” She’s still holding the sword, loose tails of leather hanging down from the hilt.

“I don’t owe you anything, _demon_ ,” he hisses, and coughs; his voice is rough with disuse.

She sighs. “Oh, well. Chantry die-hard, yes? Or is it the horns?” He stares at her. “How did you get in here?”

“I walked.” His hand is on his blade and he backs away a few paces, eager to put some ground between them. The canvas door grows ever-distant.

“There should be guards.”

“There were.” She gives him a hard, bright look, glance scanning him up and down and he realizes that she must think he’d killed them. Fine, let her. Why would she care, anyway? “What _are_ you?” he asks.

"What, you’ve never seen a qunari before?" she says lightly, which doesn’t make sense. He’s heard people talk about the horned giants from the north. Maybe they look like her - towering statues with bronzed skin tight over taunt muscles - but that cannot possibly be all she is. "Not exactly worldly, are you?"

"You can see me," he says, and she narrows her eyes at him, one hand flexing unconsciously.

"Should I not?"

"You’re a demon," he says with white-hot certainty. He’s expecting denial, anger, maybe even laughter, but instead she just looks thoughtful, like she’s mulling the idea over.

"You know…maybe I am."

She raises her left hand to him, as if she’s beckoning, and the Veil opens in her palm.

There’s no bleak sky, no hazy distortions of nightmares, but it feels as if an echo of the Fade itself is spilling into the room; it pools in the pit of his stomach, blurs and distorts the room around him while it simultaneously sharpens every sense.

And then she lunges at him.

It’s a clumsy move, and from too far away. For a split-second moment Cole considers fighting her and ending everything now, but then instincts kick in and he runs, dodging under her outstretched arm and out into the thunderous night.

He only realizes later how strange it is she doesn’t chase him.


	2. Chapter 2

He doesn’t stop following the camp.

His options are the same as they ever were, no matter that she saw him; kill her, or see what answers waiting yields. For now, he is content to wait. But he takes to lurking at the edges of camp rather than wandering carelessly through the center of it, confident that he is visible to nobody. He wonders if she could always see him. Had she just been toying with him, waiting for the perfect moment to frighten him?

Somehow he doubts it. He doesn’t know how demons – well, other demons – operate, but lying in wait for weeks only to do exactly nothing with the opportunity seems like a waste. Could it be possible that she has forgotten herself, that in her own mind she is no demon at all? Thinking of the burst of green sitting in her palm it seems hard to believe. And yet…

He wonders, if she is not totally aware of herself, whether her awareness of him will be faulty too. Will she still be able to see him in a week? A month? Or was that one occurrence in the tent a rare flash of lucidity? If he stays out of sight, will he eventually vanish even from her memories, the way he has with nearly everybody he’s ever met? For his own safety and the hope of finding resolution, Cole hopes this is the case. And yet he can’t help but feel a little melancholy at the idea. There is nobody else left in the world who knows he exists. Even if the day comes where there are no paths left open for him but to kill her, he harbors a secret, perverse hope that she will die carrying a memory of him, if only to assure himself briefly that he is more than a shadow.

It’s an awful thought. Rhys would not have approved.

He is skulking around the edges of a clearing the second time she sees him. Cole is picking at some bread he took from one of the camp’s supply caravans, listening vaguely as one of Giant’s companions reads aloud to her and a nearby Seeker, all of them sitting together at the fringe of the encampment.

It’s not like any story he’s ever heard. The dwarf tells it in stops and starts – reads a sentence aloud, pauses, substitutes a word, rephrases. Writes something down. Then dictates the entire passage again from the beginning. He moves backwards and forwards in the story at will, seemingly randomly, endlessly revising and refining. It’s half compelling and half infuriating, because all the endless pieces are doing is making Cole want to hear the story from the very start.

Nobody present seems to mind, though. The Seeker has her own lapful of papers and spends the majority of her time scowling at them, occasionally shuffling them around or hunching over to make a note. Giant, for her part, is once again working on her sword. It’s an easy, casual sort of companionship, and it again strikes Cole as the sort of thing you would not find a demon taking part in. Not knowingly, anyway.

“ _There he was, surrounded by templars, utterly alone_ ,” the dwarf narrates. “ _He took a last desperate look at the debris strewn across the dock. At the corner of the eye he could see the barrels of Qunari loot stacked high, ready for loading. He braced himself_. And then he says… wait, I’ve got this – he says _‘I guess I always wanted to go out with a bang-‘_ ”

“You can’t just let him get out of that with a witticism,” Giant interrupts, straightening her back and looking at the dwarf with exasperation. “Don’t you have any integrity?”

“Patience,” he protests, voice warm with amusement. “Let me finish before you go all Hightown Review on me. Besides, I thought you liked this kind of crap.”

“Can’t help it. I had a misspent youth,” she says, solemnly.

“Like an ex-cleric in a brothel,” says the dwarf with a sigh. “Alright then. Now, where was I…?”

But she’s not looking at him any longer. She’s looking beyond him. Right at Cole.

“ _…And with a great flourish, he_ \- am I boring you, Inquisitor?”

Giant’s gaze snaps back to the dwarf, lightning-fast. She opens her mouth. Closes it. Then - “Thought I heard something moving,” she says, shrugging. “Probably just a deer.” And with a studied nonchalance, she goes back to polishing her blade.

A beat, and then the Seeker stands up abruptly. “Cassandra,” Giant calls, but the Seeker just makes a short-tempered shushing sound at her and stalks over towards the treeline. Cole stands very, very still as she approaches. He’s always been so desperate to be seen, but these last few months seem to have been a complete reversal. To Seekers, he would sooner remain a ghost, and this woman is no exception. Her eyes are intelligent and sharp, like that of a hawk, and for just a second she stares directly at him, her brow furrowed. Cole wonders if maybe perception is catching. If she sees, he will have to kill her, or run. And then how likely is it he will ever find out what really happened? The moment stretches painfully long - then she moves on, pushing further into the trees with the kind of noise that would scare off anything lurking, deer or otherwise. He chances a look over back at the clearing. The dwarf, clearly having decided the diversion is uninteresting, has gone back to his book. Giant, however, is looking directly at him and when she catches his eye she raises both her eyebrows at him, wordlessly. He doesn’t know what to make of that.

The Seeker bustles back past him, so close she nearly catches his arm on her shield. Giant’s gaze slides from him to the Seeker seamlessly, as if the expression was always meant for her and her alone. “Well?”

The woman shrugs irritably. “Deer,” she concludes. Giant nods, casually. After a moment of consideration she stands up, stretching. The dwarf looks up.

“You don’t want to find out what happens? Violet, I’m hurt.”

“You don’t _know_ what happens yet,” she says with a slow grin. “You can read it all to me over the campfire later, when you’ve actually finished the chapter. In the meantime? I’m going to go catch up with Vivienne.”

~

Now she’s seen him once, she doesn’t seem to be able to stop.

Solstice has seen the boy around camp half a dozen times since, in a sudden moment of realization, she had first noticed him spying on her. And always, nobody else takes any notice of him.

Solstice has no predilection for mysteries, nor for any kind of supernatural goings on. She doesn’t know if that makes her perfect for the Inquisition or the most unsuitable leader they could possibly hope for. Things are true, or they are not. And if something is unclear and likely to cause trouble, then it needs to be made clear. There is a mystery hiding in the shadows of her camp - _her_ camp - and she means to unravel it as quickly as possible.

Varric and Cassandra both give her strange looks when it becomes apparent she wants to spend the evening away from the rest of the Inquisition. Varric seems concerned, Cassandra is – rightly - suspicious, but she manages to convince both that she simply needs time alone to think. The silent, stoic stereotype can be so useful sometimes.

She sets herself a short way outside the camp. They have been travelling upriver; her little clearing opens on one side into the young water, rushing down from the Frostbacks. There, she sets up a fire, pulls a pair of recently-ruined gloves out of her pack and begins to work, stitching up every loosened seam, inspecting them and trying to work out which leather panels need replacing and which can be salvaged.

"I have a question," she declares to the chill night air, after feeling like a suitable amount of time has elapsed, "if you’re there. Why, exactly, do you think me a demon?"

For a long moment, there is no reply. Foolish, she thinks, and goes back to her repairs.

"… You see things you shouldn’t." The answer comes from somewhere behind her, from the safety of where the clearing gives way to a loose collection of trees and underbrush. Solstice makes a point of not reacting physically, resisting the urge to instinctively turn around. After some consideration, she sews another stitch.

"Yes, I’ve noticed." He’s not the first person to call her such a thing and he certainly won’t be the last. It’s been slung as an insult at her more than times than she cares to count. Genuine accusation has only really come recently, after the Breach opened up around her. That had been from Cassandra, her handsome face alight with anger as she put a sword to Solstice’s neck – and that, at least, had made sense. This, however, is interesting. She rolls her shoulders languidly. “If you’re an assassin you’re not a very good one. What are you, some sort of hedge mage?”

“…Something like that.”

“Well, your magic’s patchy at best. Now I’ve seen you I can’t seem to unsee you.” Silence. “Is that intentional?”

“No.”

“Looks like you need more practice, then.”

“It’s usually unbreakable,” he says, his voice uneven. Solstice turns carefully, feeling as if abrupt movement is likely to cause trouble, and examines him.

She had let him go out of pity during their first encounter. He’s not tall, not at all well-built, and with that desperate look in his eyes Solstice had assumed he was just an overzealous commoner from one of the many villages they had passed, angry at her for, well – insulting their Maker by surviving the explosion, or causing it, or being a race still rare enough down in the south to inspire fear and therefore anger. All her days have been long, since the peace conference was destroyed and the Inquisition began to coalesce around her. She has very little patience, but better to scare such a runt away. Dealing with such ignorance isn’t worth the effort of having to remove a body from her own tent, not when he was clearly no threat at all, just the son of some farmer with a too-tight grip on a blade he didn’t know how to use properly.

Looking at him now it’s clear she made an error of judgment on more counts than just his abilities. He had looked pathetic back in the soft lamplight of the tent, an exhausted-looking boy with too-worn leathers caked in dirt and grime. Now, half-hidden in the long shadows of the trees, he looks dangerous. The light that catches across his eyes makes him look like something wild, an animal with tension wired into the poise of every muscle, ready to fight or run at an instant’s notice. They regard each other silently for a long moment, a shadow and a beacon so ill-fitting in a crowd that she stopped noticing the stares years ago.

“Do you know you’re a demon?” The words tumble out of him in a rush, as if they’re words he’s saying against better judgment. It’s such a stupid question she nearly laughs without thinking, but there’s a desperate sincerity to the question that gives her pause.

“I think I’d notice something like that,” she replies, and is met with silence. “Is that why you’re still here?” She raises an eyebrow. “Looking for something to make a deal with?”

He shakes his head. “Why didn’t you tell the Seeker where I was?”

“Cassandra? Because she would have killed you. Or she would have thought I was mad, since I’m guessing she still wouldn’t have been able to see you.”

Talking with Vivienne had not shed much light on this particular conundrum; opening the conversation with _So can you use magic to turn yourself invisible_ had merely earned her A Look from the mage and the conversation had gone downhill from there. Solstice is sure Vivienne thinks her a lumbering oaf on whom her Fade mark is utterly wasted, and Solstice is not entirely sure she disagrees. When it comes to understanding magic and its intricacies, she may as well be a qalaba. Eventually, Vivienne had brushed her off with an airy hand, casually remarking on hedge mages and blood magic – _nothing you’d want anything to do with, darling_ – and Solstice had been left with more questions than answers.

“So, tell me the truth. Why are you still following me?”

"Did you kill my friends?" The words are half-spoken, half hiss, his breath hitching as if the words themselves are painful to speak.

Ah.

“That would depend on who your friends are,” she says, carefully. It’s the wrong answer. The man’s mouth twists unhappily and he shifts his grip on his knife. Solstice wonders if he’s going to make the mistake of trying to attack her.

“I followed them,” he says, finally. “All the way across Orlais. I saw the explosion. I saw you walk away, and they – and _they_ -” His voice cracks; Solstice has a moment to register the anguish on his face before he backs away, melting into the shadows. In the quiet of the night he can hear his ragged breaths, and despite herself she feels a pang of sympathy. Angry people are easy to kill; it’s harder when the person is clearly in such pain, and she’s not yet convinced that this won’t end in bloodshed. When he reemerges into the light he has his blade drawn and pointing directly at her, arm extended, face once again composed.

"Did you do it?"

“You’re talking about the Breach. In which case …no, I didn’t.” She recalls tension in the air, too many people in one place, the electric crackle in the air of history about to be made. Feeling the reassuring press of her sword, cold against her back. Light, confusion, pain. Haze. And then - the aftermath. Standing dazed and alone, towering higher than ever over the crowd now that all other participants are ash and bone.

However. Whatever little she remembers, she knows she is made of solid earth and steel, and that that kind of world-shattering chaos is the very antithesis of her. Until recently, anyway.

She lifts her hand. The Veil unfurls in her palm and she regards it a moment before returning her gaze to the young man. He is staring at the glow, looking haunted.

“I don’t know why your friends died and I survived,” she says. “Something strange happened up there, and I was left with this.” She shrugs. “You’re looking for somebody to blame.”

“Yes.”

“We could fight it out, if you really think I’m the one you’re looking for. Of course, I think I’d have no trouble killing you, so it’s a trade-off. Would it make you feel better?”

He gives her a wary look, clearly unsure how to respond. After a pause, he lowers his weapon. Solstice follows his lead, flames of unreality fading into nothing as she closes her palm.

“I’m no demon. I may be marked, but it hasn’t made me into something I’m not. Just made my life more complicated. Sorry.”

It’s the truth. Solstice can almost see the fight drain out of the boy as he processes the words. Without the wild-animal tension he just looks small, and sad, and tired.

Solstice isn’t sure why she does it. But she isn’t in the habit of overanalysing her every move, and it just feels right. She motions towards her fire with her head. The young man just stares at her. “I won’t bite,” she assures him. She remembers what it was like for her when she first left the Qun, years ago – months of wandering from place to place burdened with a newfound lack of purpose – and he seems just as lost as she was then, a person with no clear place in the world. He hesitates before venturing out of the cover of the trees, crouching on the far side of the fire as if still afraid she’s going to attack him. She watches him for a moment, the young man clearly torn between wanting to drink in the warmth of the flames and keep a safe distance from her, then goes back to her repairs.

“I thought maybe if I followed you I’d find out the truth,” he says after a minute.

“Maybe you will,” she replies, tugging at a piece of sinew. “Do you know where this camp is going?”

“No.”

“We’re travelling to another fortress, up another path into the Frostbacks. We’re going to take it for our own. We’re going to find out exactly who thought they could blow up two world leaders and get away with it. And then I’m going to kill them.” She pauses. “Unless Cassandra does it first, that is. We may have to toss for it.”

“You’re working with the Seekers.”

“Sort of. The ones here at camp aren’t Seekers anymore, not really.”

“They’re not good people.”

Solstice gives him a sidelong look. “I’ve spent far more time with them then I’ve spent talking to you. How do I know you’re a good person?”

The young man shifts uncomfortably. “You don’t.”

“Well then. I think when it comes to who’s company I keep I’ll trust my judgement over yours.” He doesn’t protest at that. “How long were you spying on me before I noticed you?”

“A while,” he says finally, refusing to meet her eyes.

“And nobody else ever spotted you.”

“No,” he says morosely. “They never do.” And with a jolt it occurs to Solstice that maybe none of this is intentional. Not only her ability to see him, but the fact that he is imperceptible in the first place.

“Can you, erm….turn it off?”

“I don’t think so.”

Solstice exhales, slowly. Hedge-mage, Vivienne had said. She had always been taught that the abilities of a saarebas were a strange and dangerous thing, a power that those burdened with it could not – and would not be expected to be able to – control. The illustrations her mind had provided for her as an imekari had been vivid and violent – walls of fire, untold waves of destruction. And she’s heard stories of mages who live outside the Qun succumbing to such a fate, turning into abominations and causing mayhem. But now she wonders if it is possible for such a loss of control to manifest inwards, not outwards. Could magic, left unchecked and untrained, possibly twist and tear away at the existence of the mage themselves rather than their surroundings? Solstice knows very little of such things. If possible, it seems like a heavy burden to bear, and an incredibly lonely kind of existence.

She steals a glance at the boy. He’s staring into the fire, face unreadable.

“I want to help,” he announces suddenly. “If you’re going to find who killed Rhys, then I – I want to help.”

“Can you fight?”

“I can kill,” he says, quietly. “If I have to.”

He looks pale and uncertain in the firelight, but there’s a resolve in his eyes that backs up his statement; it’s the way Cassandra looks whenever she talks about the Divine, grief tempered by cold-steel rage. The kind of rage that forges a certainty – that action must be taken, that things must be put right, otherwise the world won’t make sense anymore.

“Stop lurking in other people’s tents and I think we may have a deal. Do you have a name?”

“…Cole.”

“I’m Solstice.” There’s no formality to it, no handshake or pledge, just a long look exchanged between the two of them across the fire. Solstice doesn’t know how it’s going to work, having an agent seemingly only she can see; but these are details. Something to be worked out later.

“Well then. I suppose it’s on me to welcome you to the Inquisition.”

~

She is as wary of him as he is with every one of them. He is awkward and shy around camp; he is vicious in the field. The first time Solstice sees him open up the throat of two Red Templars in succession by simply walking up to them and striking, the second standing idly by as his companion bleeds out, like some kind of dumb animal waiting for slaughter – it is a sight that makes her suddenly understand the undertones of every fear-soaked passage of the Chant she’s ever heard recited.

He won’t tell her - won’t tell anybody - where these talents come from. Perhaps he doesn’t even know himself.

Vivienne denounces him as a demon the moment she first sees him. Cassandra keeps her distance with narrowed eyes. It takes very little time for it to become apparent that he’s barely in control of his powers at all; the first time Cassandra sees him seems as much of a shock to him as it is to her. Awareness blooms in the people around him like slow waking, faster and more immediate every time, until the moment Sera introduces herself within seconds of walking into camp by telling him he needs a haircut – as if he were never hard to notice at all.

It’s not until months later that he tells Solstice the truth. Two days after Solas joins the Inquisition, he joins her at the night watch and admits as much as he can, voice shaking. Solstice listens, and thinks, and then watches him wait for her reaction. The sense of the beast is there again, as she has now seen more than a few times when Cole is backed into a corner; pre-emptive aggression, fear, the sense that in the next moment Cole will become either predator or prey and has not yet decided which role is his.

“Are you going to do anything stupid about it?”

“What?”

“You heard me. Do I have to worry about you hurting one of my other agents?”

“Not unless they give me a reason to,” he says, over-honest, and then shies away from the look on her face. “I only meant – no. You don’t have to worry.”

“Good.”

“You’re not going to tell me to leave?”

“Do you want to?”

He is silent at that, but Solstice knows the answer to the question anyway. “You can’t help what you are,” she says, simply. “I trust you. Don’t do anything to undermine that and you’ll be fine. Just…you know. Don’t tell Bull.”

And that’s all she has to say on the matter.

~

Back in her other life, she knows they would have turned aside their distaste for waste especially for him, a _saarebas_ -who-is-not- _saarebas_ , something unnatural and wild, something that does not fit right with the rest of the world. Something even less predictable than your standard demon or abomination, and therefore more dangerous. A monster.

But she knows exactly the same could be said of her. And the blooming flower of unreality that rests in her palm is not the sum of her, not by a long shot.

She watches as Varric shuffles his well-worn deck and begins to deal the cards. “Now, this one…this is the bane of many a drunkard back in Kirkwall. Can’t begin to tell you how many drinks I’ve paid for with a good hand. Diamondback.”

“I know how to play this one!” Cole says suddenly, and then shuts his mouth abruptly, clearly embarrassed at how loudly he has spoken. “Rhys taught me.”

“Good,” says Varric, and pats him with avuncular familiarity on the forearm. “Then you can help me teach Violet here. Right now, if this world-saving rigmarole comes down to a card game then I’m sorry to say we are all up shit creek without a paddle, sparkly Fade powers or not.” And Solstice huffs good-naturedly as Sera sniggers at her, and Cole dips his head in an effort to hide a ghost of a smile.

Yes, maybe they are monsters, by the doctrine of the Qun or the Chantry or by the judgment of a thousand strangers.

It doesn’t matter at all.


End file.
